Quotes about schooling
Robert D. Putnam - Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.
Jeffrey Tucker -
A person who says “every person has a right to a decent education” may not actually mean “people should be robbed to support bad schools” or “all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years.
Ross W. Greene - Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them
Half of teachers leave the profession within their first four years, and kids with behaviour challenges and their parents are cited as one of the major reasons.
Supreme Court of Wisconsin -
There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter into our civil affairs, our government soon would be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed. Those who made our Constitution saw this, and used the most apt and comprehensive language in it to prevent such a catast
Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think a
Bruce Springsteen -
One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive - very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure get lost.
Ziad K. Abdelnour -
The trouble with school is they give you the answer, then they give you the exam. That's not life....
Louisa May Alcott -
Yet that is considered an excellent school, and I dare say it would be if the benighted lady did not think it necessary to cram her pupils like Thanksgiving turkeys, instead of feeding them in a natural and wholesome way. It is the fault with most American schools, and the poor little heads will go on aching till we learn better.
Derrick Jensen - and Revolution
In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned to give myself away.
Xela Ffonrims -
In the race of life I would rather to be around the best and sink than to be around mediocrity and swim.
Debasish Mridha -
Schooling gives you knowledge, but education makes you wise.
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.
Irvin Anthony -
Well, Jack, we have taken the Macedonian, and your share of the prize, if we get her in safely, may be two hundred dollars; what will you do with it?” Stephen Decatur, commanding the frigate United States, North Atlantic, near the Azores Islands, 1812.“One hundred will go to my mother, sir, and the other I shall spend on schooling.” Jack Creamer, aged ten.
Mark Twain -
Don't let schooling interfere with your education.
Mark Twain -
I never let schooling interfere with my education.
Miyamoto Musashi - The Book of Five Rings
In my school, no consideration is given to anything unreasonable; the heart of the matter is to use the power of the knowledge of martial arts to gain victory any way you can.
Will Advise - Nothing is here...
A relationship is a process. If you have nothing to learn - you have a slave to teach. 's why schools are effective.
John Holt - How Children Fail
For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with lif
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.
Jiddu Krishnamurti - Education and the Significance of Life
To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities
Leonardo da Vinci -
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Jean Piaget -
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.
John Holt -
Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.
George Pelecanos - Soul Circus
We get schooled by the people around us, and it stays inside us deep.
Heidi Julavits - The Uses of Enchantment
Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressio
John Holt - How Children Fail
This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."It is the creed of a sla
John Holt - How Children Fail
Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meetingby a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book — mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.But as I later realized,
Paul Goodman - Compulsory Mis-education/The Community of Scholars
Education is a natural community function and occurs inevitably, since the young grow up on the old, towards their activities, and into (or against) their institutions; and the old foster, teach, train, exploit and abuse the young. Even neglect of the young, except physical neglect, has an educational effect -- not the worst possible.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -
Education aims at solving problems, but some educators are problems to be solved
H.G. Wells - The History of Mr. Polly
Mr. Polly went into the National School at six and he left the private school at fourteen, and by that time his mind was in much the same state that you would be in, dear reader, if you were operated upon for appendicitis by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather over-worked and under-paid butcher boy, who was superseded towards the climax of the operation by a left-handed clerk of high principles but intemperate habits,—that is to say, it was in a thorough mess.
Immanuel Kant - Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Since in early youth it cannot be known what ends are likely to occur to us in the course of life, parents seek to have their children taught a great many things, and provide for their skill in the use of means for all sorts of arbitrary ends, of none of which can they determine whether it may not perhaps hereafter be an object to determine their pupil, but which it is at all events possible that he might aim at; and this anxiety is so great that they commonly neglect to form and correct their j
Matthew Desmond - Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Arleen thanked Pana. Getting off the phone, she thanked Jesus. She smiled. When she smiled she looked like a different person. The press had loosened its grip. From landlords, she had heard eighty-nine nos but one yes. Jori accepted his mother’s high five. He and his brother would have to switch schools. Jori didn’t care. He switched schools all the time. Between seventh and eighth grades, he had attended five different schools—when he went at all. At the domestic-violence shelter alone, Jori ha
Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don’t whip me, I won’t work." He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him. This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, "the system," is pulled by mules. This is a common,
Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn’t what he wanted to do.
Candy Schulman -
As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated.If they make it that far.
Pawan Mishra - Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
It was a time when a degree was expected but not much respected.
John Geddes - A Familiar Rain
...some nights I'd sneak out and listen to the radio in my Dad's old Chevy - children need solitude - they don't teach that in school...
Ron Rash - Serena
We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it
Ayn Rand - Anthem
We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.
John Taylor Gatto -
School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
What I learned on my own I still remember
Tim Fargo -
If we spark a student's passion, we unleash a powerful force upon the world.
Ogwo David Emenike -
Education is for freedom - freedom from mental slavery.
Amy Joy -
Literature cannot be imposed it must be discovered.
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
Maria Montessori -
To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself--that is the first duty of the educator.
Hasse Jerner -
The task for parents and teachers is not to teach, it is how to inspire the people of youth to find their desire to learn.
Maria Montessori -
If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future.